The cactus sat on my windowsill like an accusation at first, a reminder of everything I hadn’t been given and every conversation we’d never had. Yet every time I thought of throwing it away, I couldn’t. I watched how it held water in its hidden core, surviving on almost nothing, and it slowly stopped feeling like an insult. It felt like a mirror. While my half-sister called lawyers and appraisers, I learned its rhythms: when it needed light, when it needed turning, how its needles caught the sun.

When she finally demanded it back, her voice carried a tremor I recognized—fear of having misread the man we both lost. Saying no was the first boundary I’d ever set with our family. The envelope I found tangled in its roots didn’t fix the past, but it rewrote my place in it. His clumsy, tender confession wasn’t about money at all. It was about who he trusted to notice what he’d hidden in plain sight—and who he believed would keep living, even on what looked like almost nothing.